Comment by CasualSuperman
21 days ago
With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.
Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.
I spent 15 years as a senior dev on the Visual Studio team followed by 5 years on the Xcode team at Apple.
Individual engineers can be talented, professional, and end-user focused. Most of that effort gets lost when PMs refuse to work with each other in a coherent manner. Most of the major issues we ran into weren’t engineering bugs per se, they were the result of management refusing to allow teams to communicate effectively.
When we were first building out the original C# functionality, the C# team refused to talk to the existing compiler teams. I spent more time acting as a go-between than I did solving actual technical problems.
Good people can produce crappy software in that environment.
Not op, and I generally agree with your assumption but not for Microsoft, as I don't think it's limited to Windows:
Teams, Office (especially online), One Drive, SharePoint, Azure, GitHub, LinkedIn, all became very shitty and partially unusable with increasing number of weird bugs or problems lately.
And it's not just Microsoft. Apple and other are having the same issue. Something fundamental seems to have happened post Covid but before AI.
WFH, flood of Dev hiring, increasingly hostile worker relations, a bunch of web 2.0 folks finally retiring, VC money drying up...
take your pick.
Software is just crappy these days.
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But M$ share price goes up! Investors are smart as they are rich! And they do believe in this all!
/sarcasm
The criticism was directed at the company's product, not the employees...
I always wish that people would make this distinction more often ... the people=good, the product=bad ... people!=bad
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The response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.
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Skilled engineers in an environment that doesn't care about quality may become dull, or simply be forced by the system they are in to not care. In practice they are just like us and so I assume they would find outlets in their free time.
I haven't spoken to a Microsoft developer in a while because there are few in the hacker communities I'm around (go figure?) so not entirely sure though. I want to understand.
These giant firms aren’t uniform monoliths, especially MS.
Microsoft has some clear ‘A’ teams (compilers, industry leading languages, F*, pioneering web tech, OS innovations, etc), but also ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ teams, and MS is often reactively chasing industry trends. They’re industry leaders, but also victims of their Office, Windows, and Cloud teams pooping on one another at critical market junctures.
In .Net land we can inspect their library code. A number of these ‘Enterprise’ packages around their ‘Enterprise’ solutions are … just passable. Often something you’d write a proper version of to avoid clear issues. When our juniors are delivering better than their official offerings, in light of wizardry being displayed elsewhere, I think we are seeing systematic effects of corporate culture and customer base.
They seem to be alienating a lot of their users right now in a lot of different products. There's a significant surge in open source software right now and Linux and all the people that are coming over are a bit more than usual. Their customer base seems tired of the game.
This is not about individual employees. It’s in the nature of being an employee to be beholden to what’s incentivized by their company’s management and structure.
Don’t employees have any say in some of the design , implementation, and quality bar? Management folks are employees as well. But perhaps they prefer the paycheck to voicing concerns around bad decisions. Nothing wrong with that but throwing all the blame on faceless management and structure seems not right since it evolves from collective activities.
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The problems with Windows today have nothing to do with bugs but with the strategic vision of Nadella.
And it’s the employees that’ll be laid off if the strategy doesn’t succeed because they just didn’t copilot hard enough or something.
This is also still small/unimportant enough not to be poisoned by their broken corporate culture.
UI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users.
You can get something similar yourself at home running all the debloat tools out there but since they're not officially supported, either you'll break future windows updates, or the future windows updates will break your setup, so it's not worth it.
Something similar, or indeed, exactly the same:
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/leak...
Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.
So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11.
I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.
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Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.
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I geniunely wonder if Windows G's start menu also use React and if the start menu, right click or Windows Search still sucks in Windows G or not :)
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Microsoft should just open source Windows at this point.
Never heard of Windows G .. that sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads :-)
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> Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
In their intended applications, which might or might not be the ones you need.
The slowness of the filesystem that necessitated a whole custom caching layer in Git for Windows, or the slowness of process creation that necessitated adding “picoprocesses” to the kernel so that WSL1 would perform acceptably and still wasn’t enough for it to survive, those are entirely due to the kernel’s archtecture.
It’s not necessarily a huge deal that NT makes a bad substrate for Unix, even if POSIX support has been in the product requirements since before Win32 was conceived. I agree with the MSR paper[1] on fork(), for instance. But for a Unix-head, the “good” in your statement comes with important caveats. The filesystem is in particular so slow that Windows users will unironically claim that Ripgrep is slow and build their own NTFS parsers to sell as the fix[2].
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/785430/
[2] https://nitter.net/CharlieMQV/status/1972647630653227054
This is on the mark.
But there's another issue which is what cripples windows for dev! NTFS has a terrible design flaw which is the fact that small files, under 640 bytes, are stored in the MFT. The MFT ends up having serious lock contention so lots of small file changes are slow. This screws up anything Unixy and git horribly.
WSL1 was built on top of that problem which was one of the many reasons it was slow as molasses.
Also why ReFS and "dev drive" exist...
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This is not due to slowness of the file system. Native ntfs tools are much faster than Unix ones in some situations. The issue is that running Unix software on windows will naturally have a performance impact. You see the same thing in reverse using Wine on Linux. Windows uses a different design for IO so requires software to be written with that design in mind.
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The file system isn't slow. The slowness will be present in any file system due to the file system filters that all file system calls pass though.
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The Windows filesystem isn't slow per se, it's a slowness caused by "a thousand cuts" type of problem.
https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
NTFS, not so great.
NTFS is just fine. Stable, reliable, fast, plenty of features for a general purpose file system.
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This isn't supposed to replace Windows, and it isn't a GUI desktop operating system at all. I doubt anyone working on this has anything to do with the modern Windows desktop UX.
> This isn't supposed to replace Windows,
OP wasn't suggesting it was, just that the lack of quality in one significant area of the company's output leads to a lack of confidence in other products that they release.
Given anything the size of Microsoft, it's not a good assumption. MS has large research teams that produce really interesting things. Their output is unrelated to released products.
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but if the host OS is already comprised, what is the point of sandbox inside of it?
Maybe we need secure attestation for sandbox to be protected against compromised host :)
It does sound hard, and might need to employ homomorphic encryption with hw help for any memory access after code has been also verifiably unaltered through (uncompromised) hw attestation.
I know windows 11 is super buggy and riddled with issues (and the copilot mess), but I'm starting to feel there's a weird echo chamber around these forums that don't even bother looking at what the product or repository is, and automatically assume it's bad 'cause it's from Microsoft.
Once the amount of bad software coming out of a shop rises over 50% this becomes a sane assumption, since it is more likely than not, that it is trash coming out of that shop. So in case of MS it does seem a reasonable assumption to make.
I use Windows 11 all day and can't agree it's buggy at all, compared to Windows of the past it's very reliable. The worst I can say is they've made some poor decisions about the defaults around ads in the UI. But all of that is easy to turn off.
Windows is ultimately a lot more complex, and not open source. This also builds on the Linux ecosystem, so even if it comes from Microsoft, I imagine engineering culture is different from that on Windows and especially their online platforms (that's even worse than Windows if you ask me!).
MSR is a somewhat independent org; you should be making predictions based on other MSR projects
I'm not defending MS in any capacity, but this library is open for viewing if you were so inclined.
Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy. Maybe it works, but yeah you'll probably get screwed over at some point.
Still, the fact that it's open source is a good thing. People can now take that code and make something better (ripping out the AI for example) or just use bits and pieces for their own totally unrelated projects. I can't see that as anything but a win. I have no problem giving shitty companies credit where its due and they've done a good thing here.
> Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy.
That's a very unfair assessment. In many areas, Microsoft services and Windows are better protected than most alternatives (e.g., disk encryption, virtualization-based isolation,...), and security is taken pretty seriously for new products.
Microsoft US a massive corporation with so many people, business units, departments.
A comment like yours is just like saying: "I know a buggy open-source software, why would I trust that other open-source project? The open-source community burned all possible goodwill".
Except that a company, no matter how heterogenous, has an overarching organization, whereas the open-source community doesn't.
There is no CEO of open source, there are no open-source shareholders, there are no open-source quarterly earnings reports, there are no open-source P&G policies (with or without stack ranking), and so on.